The first lesson only covered the first stanza; this one covers the next two.

Adjectif possessif : possession

Do you know all the possessive adjectives in French? They correspond to words like ‘his’ or ‘your’, but unlike ‘his’ and ‘her’, which depend on the gender of the person possessing the thing, French possessive adjectives depend on the gender and number of the actual items being possessed. They can also depend on whether the thing being possessed starts with a vowel (or an h muet) to avoid the hiatus that I mentioned in a previous lesson. The song lists some of the possessive adjectives you should know:

Mes, tes, ses, nos, vos, leurs, mon, ton, son

Those are just some of the masculine and plural possessive adjectives; there are several others:

Ma, ta, sa, notre, votre, leur, ta

Actually, we don’t know whether the song says leur or leurs, since they sound the same, but the lyrics I found online had leurs, and that goes with the other plural possessive adjectives listed.

Next the song gives a confusing example which contains a lot of words that sound like possessive adjectives, but aren’t. I’ve put actual possessive adjectives in bold, and words that sound like possessive adjectives underlined, all colour-coded to match the possessive adjectives they sound like, if they appear elsewhere. I’ve tried to use a somewhat colourblind-safe palette, but sorry if you have trouble distinguishing some of the colours.

Plurals (or should that be pluraux?)

Do you know your French irregular plurals? A lot of French words ending in -al, and a few ending in -ail, be they adjectives (e.g. international), or nouns (e.g. cheval, journal, travail) change to -aux in the masculine plural (e.g. internationaux, chevaux, journaux, travaux). But many words that already end in -au or -eau (tuyau, bateau) also take an -x in the plural (tuyaux, bateaux), so if you only knew the plural forms you might be confused about the singular. Or maybe, like The Arrogant Worms possibly do in their song about Celine Dion (inasmuch as the French at the end of that song is decipherable), you get chevaux (the plural of cheval) confused with cheveux (the plural of cheveu) because they look so similar. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe this is all perfectly simple for you. In that case, don’t worry, there are some exceptions just for you. Some words ending in -al (e.g. bal, régal, carneval) just take a regular -s in the plural.

That will do for this lesson. Even though I’d already written most of it, I still didn’t find the time to publish it after a week, as I’d promised. It’s hard to predict how much free time I’ll have when I’m away from home, and I lost some work a browser crash. Tune in next week or so to learn about agreement.

If you want to keep learning between lessons, then first of all, of course, buy the songs I’ve mentioned (or better, the albums they’re on) and listen to them while thinking about what you can learn from them. Also, try duolingo, and feel free to follow me. If you’re already fairly fluent, the regular exercises might be detrimental (as they train you to translate simple sentences rather than simply understanding and responding to them without going via your native language) so I recommend the ‘Immersion‘ section where you read and translate interesting real-world text. If you’re still learning the basics, the exercises are useful, but don’t be afraid to try a bit of translation as well. Start with a topic you already know a lot about — before I was at all confident with reading or translating German, I found German Wikipedia articles related to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy surprisingly easy to read.

This is the first of what’s turning out to be far too many lessons about the song ‘Grammaire Song’ by Chanson Plus Bifluorée, which you can listen to below (from a well-hidden extracts page of the band’s website) and buy from epm musique or maybe from your electronic music retailer of choice. There’s so much in the song that this lesson only covers the first stanza. I’ll publish a new lesson every week until the song’s finished; it’ll probably be four lessons, though I’ve only written the first two so far, so it could end up longer.

The last song had an exercise attached, but this song doesn’t need any correction; it just lists and illustrates some grammatical concepts you should make sure you’re familiar with.

As before, I’ll assume you know French well enough to work out what the lyrics mean, but just need practice or ways to remember things. I’ll tend to link to other sites rather than explaining everything in detail. If you have any questions about the grammar or the meaning of the song, though, feel free to ask in the comments, and I’ll answer in the comments and maybe in a later post. Let me know if you spot any mistakes in my explanations or example sentences, too; I have a DALF C1 and half a Masters in linguistics, which doesn’t actually make me qualified to teach, whatever Tom Lehrer says.

Okay, now what can we learn from this song? For starters (that is, en apéritif) how about the subjunctive.

Le subjontif

D’accord, c’est un peu rébarbatifLe subjonctif en apéritif

The subjunctive is one of several grammatical moods of a verb, others including the imperative (see below) and the indicative. In English, the subjunctive is often similar enough to the indicative that we don’t know we’re using it, but it’s important that you know when to use the subjunctive in French. It usually comes after the word ‘that’ (in French, que.) In the phrase, ‘it’s important that you know when to use the subjunctive’, ‘know’ is subjunctive because I’m not saying you do know; I don’t know whether you do or not. I’m just saying it’s important for you to know. Whereas in ‘the subjunctive is often similar enough to the indicative that we don’t know we’re using it’, I am saying that we don’t know we’re using it, so I don’t need to use the subjunctive. Here’s the same sentence in French, using ‘on‘ for both ‘we’ and the general ‘you’ because I wanted to show how different the indicative and subjunctive forms of ‘know’ (in bold) are without even changing the pronoun.

There’ll be a whole song on the subjunctive later in this series, with an exercise, so if you don’t quite get it yet, look forward to that one.

L’impératif

Passons sur le mode impératif

Okay, let’s just gloss over the imperative. You use the imperative mood to suggest that somebody do something. (See that ‘do’ there? That was the subjunctive again. ‘To suggest that somebody does something’ is a different suggestion entirely.) For example, ‘let’s gloss over the imperative’ (or more literally, ‘let’s pass on the imperative’) or passons sur le mode impératif.

Let’s summarise these moods. In the command ‘use the imperative!’ (utilisez l’impératif !) ‘use the imperative’ is in the imperative mood, while in, ‘It is imperative that you use the imperative’ (il est impératif que vous utilisiez l’impératif), ‘use the imperative’ is in the subjunctive, and in ‘You use the imperative to suggest that somebody do something’ (vous utilisez l’impératif pour suggérer que quelqu’un fasse quelque chose), ‘use the imperative’ is in the indicative, while ‘somebody do something’ is in the subjunctive. Simple, right?

Le plus-que-parfait

If you had already learnt the last two things before reading this blog, you would be perfect, but if you’d learnt this one, you’d be more than perfect! The plus-que-parfait (a.k.a. the pluperfect) is the tense you use for sentences where you’d say you ‘had’ done them in English. To make the plus-que-parfait you actually use the imparfait (imperfect) version of être or avoir to translate the ‘had’, because being made out of imperfect things is what makes something perfect even more so. You’ll hear more about the imparfait later in the song.

Le pronom relatif

Relative pronouns are the words that connect a noun you just mentioned with some more information specifying which one you’re talking about. They’re not just any words, they’re the words that connect a noun you just mentioned with some more information specifying which one you’re talking about. So, let’s say the noun you just mentioned is ‘words’, and you want to specify that the particular words you’re talking about connect a noun you just mentioned with some more information specifying which one you’re talking about, you’d use the relative pronoun ‘that’.

In French you’d use qui in this case, because ‘words’ is a subject, which means the words are the ones doing something (in this case, connecting a noun you just mentioned with some more information specifying which one you’re talking about.)

If you were talking about a noun that someone was doing something to, for instance, a noun you just mentioned (also expressed as a noun that you just mentioned), you’d use que, because that noun is being treated as an object.

There are several other relative pronouns, in English as well as French; for instance, French has duquel, which doesn’t even have a one-word equivalent in English. However, I don’t have room for the general theory of pronominal relativity here, so here’s a websitewhere you can learn about them.

That’s all for this lesson; tune in next week to learn about possessive adjectives, irregular plurals, and more.

A few days ago I posted about the song Le ours et le hirondelle by Jérémie Kisling, and encouraged French learners to try correcting its grammar by adding in all the necessary contractions. I hope some of you tried it. Here is my corrected version. Is it the same as yours? If not, which one of us is wrong, or are both versions valid?

In May 2014 I passed my DALF C1 French exam. Of course, that makes me eminently qualified to teach. I intended to spend a bit more time on a lesson plan, but for the sake of holidailies I’m just going to dive right in. I’ve always found songs to be a good way to learn French. After listening to them enough times, I have a library of grammatically-correct (or at least idiomatically accepted) sentences and properly-pronounced words in my head which I can check whenever I need to remind myself how a particular rule works or what the gender of a given noun is. So here is the first of a series of songs to learn French to.

Each one will have a song, a note on what you can learn from the song, and usually an exercise, the answers to which I’ll put up in a later post. These lessons will assume you already know the basics of French, and can look up vocabulary yourself, but just need practice or ways to remember things. I’ll tend to link to other sites rather than explaining everything in detail. If you have any questions about the grammar or the meaning of the songs, though, feel free to ask in the comments, and I’ll answer in the comments and maybe in a later post.

The following, Le ours et la hirondelle, from the album Le ours by Jérémie Kisling, is not a good song to add to that library of grammatically-correct sentences, though it’s a good one for remembering the genders of nouns. I’d recommend buying the album, not just because it is good, but also because it contains another song I’ll be blogging about later.

It is, however, a good song to learn from. To quote Carrie Dahlby, what’s wrong with this song? Here are the lyrics, in case you missed some when listening.

Have you figured out what it is yet? If you have, go ahead and write a corrected version of it for practice, and subscribe to this blog if you want to see when I post my version to compare. Otherwise, read on.

Elision

Essentially, the protagonist is a bear, and speaks like one. It’s like a French version of lolcat, which would probably be called mdrours. One big problem in bear French is that it does not have any obligatory elision. That’s when the unstressed vowel at the end of a word such as le, la, de, me, je or jusque is removed because the next word begins with a vowel. For example, you can say:

Le calembour et la colombe en rondelles

(though I don’t know why you would; it means ‘the pun and the sliced dove’, and is not a good example of either.) because the words calembour and colombe start with consonants. But you can’t say:

*Le ours et la hirondelle

(the bear and the swallow) because ours starts with a vowel, and hirondelle starts with an h muet (a silent h that French-speakers don’t even pretend to pronounce, as opposed to the h aspiré, which still isn’t pronounced but is nonetheless treated like a consonant for the purposes of elision.) So you have to say:

L’ours et l’hirondelle

You have to be careful with this, though; when a word starts with h, check a dictionary to see if it’s an h muet or an h aspiré. In the latter case, you shouldn’t do the elision. If you think you know which is which, see if you can do this exercise.

Now, as much as it might seem useless to remember the words of a grammatically incorrect song, the lack of elision does actually give learners an advantage: you could hear l’ours and l’ombre many times and still not necessarily know the genders of those nouns, unless you happen to remember lyrics where the gender is clear from other parts of the sentence. But with this song, you can tell from *le ours, *la ombre that ours is masculine and ombre is feminine. I think if it weren’t for this song, I wouldn’t know the gender of ombre.

Other Contractions

Bear French is also missing other contractions, such as des for de les, du for de le, au and aux for à le and à les respectively. There’s a great list of all these elisions and contractions over at about.com, so I won’t try to repeat that. For example, you can say:

Mais quand mes mains sont proches de tes veines…

(Though I’d be a little afraid of you if you did, since it means, ‘but when my hands are close to your veins’) because there is no contraction for de tes. Similarly, you could say:

Mais quand ma main est proche de la sienne…

(‘but when my hand is close to hers/his’) because there is no contraction of de la. But you can’t say:

*Mais quand mes mains sont proches de les siennes…

(‘but when my hands are close to hers/his’) because *de les is not allowed; it changes to des. You have to say:

Mais quand mes mains sont proches des siennes…

All of these contractions are obligatory; you should never use *de les or *à le when the le and les would be definite articles (as they always are in this song.) You will see de le, de les, à le, etc. when le and les are object pronouns, and in rare cases you can use these for names of people which start with the definite article, but none of those things are in this song.

Other Considerations

Another thing that’s weird in this song is this line:

…trébuche sur la ombre de lui-même…

Even if we elide *la ombre to l’ombre, it still translates to ‘trips over the shadow of himself’ which I think sounds as awkward in French as it does in English. What we really want to say is ‘trips over his own shadow’, which in French is:

…trébuche sur sa propre ombre…

So we end up not even needing the elision. Now, what if we just wanted to say, ‘trips over his shadow’? If you wanted to speak like a bear, you’d probably say it like this:

…*trébuche sur sa ombre…

But you’re not a bear, are you? There are two vowels with only a space between them in sa ombre, which is called a hiatus. The reason for elision above is that French speakers, like die-hard Da Vinci’s Notebook fans, do not like hiatus. There are even some adjectives with special forms for avoiding hiatus. When it comes to possessive pronouns such as sa, ma, and ta, to avoid hiatus they switch to the masculine possessive even if the noun is feminine, like ombre is. So that would be:

…trébuche sur son ombre…

You can’t tell the gender of ombre from this phrase any more than you could from l’ombre. It’s just as well you now know a song that mentions *la ombre, so you will always be able to remember the gender of the word ombre.

Exercise

Vindicate the well-educated bears of the world: go through the lyrics of Le ours et la hirondelle and fix all the problems you can find. I’ll post my fixed version in a few days and we can compare. For extra credit, figure out a way to sing the new version, or add some more words so that it can be sung to the original tune. For fun rather than credit, turn the original song into a series of lolcat-like memes featuring bears.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, if only because it was an excuse to make a fort out of language books. Here is a video of my reading my poem Séjours linguistiques (originally titled ‘Discours inférieur’ in order to have a tenuous link to the playing card of the week.)

As autumn comes I breathe your sanguine red
and tremble at the falling of each leaf.
I’ve wasted nights just sobbing on your bed
of leaves, and vow to fight impending grief.
I wrap you, still alive, to stop the shed,
your shield against the winter, metal leaf.
In spring, I take the helmet from your head,
its aventail a shroud upon the dead.

The following is a French translation of Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements“, to be sung to the tune of “Je ne suis pas bien portant” by Gaston Ouvrard. Sorry, no recording yet, I can neither sing nor pronounce French well enough. You’re welcome to try.

The following are translations of part of the introduction of Paul Otlet‘s Traité de Documentation, with varying degrees of accuracy, creativity, polish, and completion.

Grammatic

This work is dedicated to a general report of ideas relating to books and documents, and to the considered use of the elements which make up documentation.

Our time, more than any other, is characterised by these general tendencies: organisation and rationalisation of methods and procedures, automation, cooperation, globalisation, considerable development in science and technology, concerns with applying the data thereof to the good of society, extension of education at every level, aspiration and latent desire to give larger intellectual bases to all civilisation, and to direct it by guidelines.

It is in such an environment that books and documents must evolve today. Written expressions of the ideas, the instrument of their fixation, of their conservation, of their circulation, are the necessary intermediaries of all links between people. Their enormous mass, accumulated in the past, increases every day, every hour, by disconcerting, sometimes alarming numbers. Like languages, we can say that they can be the best of things and the worst of things. Like fallen rain, we can say that it can cause a flood or deluge, or spread as beneficial irrigation.

A rationalisation of books and documents is necessary, starting from an initial unit and extending to larger and larger groups of units, encompassing finally all of the units, existing or to be created, in an organisation that envisages, from the ground up, an entity of information which represents the sum of all the books and papers of each person, the collective information entity of institutions, of administrations and of companies; the entity of documentation of agencies specially dedicated to books and documents, either entirely or as one of its functions: office, institute, publishing, libraries, documentation offices. This work gives a general outline of this and defines an orderly method.

There is no small number of papers saying how to make from simple notes, the pages of a manuscript; from a pile of books, a well-organised library; from a pile of correspondence, tidy archives; from accounts, order; from a diverse set of texts, a coordinated codification. But this large number of publications, excellent at their individual goals, each only envisage one aspect of the matter, and so gave the impression that there were just as many specific domains, distinct and separated by watertight barriers; that one had to acquaint oneself with a whole new set of ideas, and become familiar with practices unrelated to those already learnt.

The current treatise aims above all to extract the facts, the principles, the general rules, and to show how coordination and unity can be obtained.

Lipogrammatic (without the fourth letter of the alphabet)

The goal of this work is a general report of notions relating to various sources of information, as well as to the thoughtful use of the elements which make up information.

The following inclinations characterise our time more than any other: organisation of algorithms, automation, co-operation, globalisation, much progress in science, whether theoretical or in terms of technological breakthroughs, concerns with applying the results of this for the benefit of society, enrichment of instruction at every level, latent will to give larger intellectual bases to all civilisation, while properly orienting it by means of plans.

It is in such an environment that information sources must now evolve. Written expressions of the notions, the instrument of their fixation, of their conservation, of their circulation, are the necessary arbiters of all communication between people. Their enormous existing mass increases relentlessly by unsettling, sometimes alarming amounts. Like languages, we can say that they can be the best of tools or the worst of tools. Just as we can say of rain that it can cause either a catastrophic torrent in a small area, or beneficial irrigation over a large area.

A rationalisation of information is necessary, starting from an initial unit, then continuing to ever larger groups of units, eventually encompassing all of the units, whether they exist yet or not, in an organisation that envisions, from the grass roots, an entity of information which represents the sum of all the written matter in each person’s possession, the collective information entity of institutions, of governments, of companies; the set of information of agencies with a special interest in the keeping of information, either in its entirety or as one of its functions: office, institute, publishing, libraries, information offices. As well as giving a general outline of the topic, this work presents a systematic solution.

There is no small number of papers saying how to make from simple notes, the pages of a manuscript; from a pile of books, a bookcase in logical arrangement; from a pile of letters, neat archives; from accounts, consistent balances; from an eclectic set of texts, a coherent synthesis. But this large number of publications, excellent at their respective goals, each only treat one aspect of the matter. In this way they gave the impression that there were just as many specific subjects, separate, kept apart by watertight barriers; that to tackle one of them, it was necessary to acquaint oneself with a whole new set of notions, to become familiar with practices bearing no relation to the ones learnt previously.

The current treatise aims first to extract the facts, the principles, the general rules, then to show how it is possible to achieve a systematic unity.

Programmatic

This document is dedicated to a general report of ideas relating to manuals and documentation.

Our time, more than any other, is characterised by these general tendencies: refactoring of methods and procedures, scriptability, internationalisation and localisation, considerable development in patterns and programming paradigms, concerns with applying these to the good of the codebase, extended instruction sets in all hardware, the aspiration and latent desire to teach everyone the One True Way, and to direct them using UML diagrams.

It’s in such an environment that documentation must evolve today. Textual records of intended functionality, the instrument of its circulation, of its guaranteed backup, and the definitive reference for distinguishing bug from feature, are the necessary interfaces between people and software. Their enormous collective filesize, accumulated in the past, increases every day, every hour, every minute, by disconcerting, sometimes alarming numbers. Like programming languages, we can say they can be the worst and the best for a given software project. Like network traffic, we can say that they can be like a DOS attack, or a favourable hit count.

Refactoring of manuals and documentation is necessary, starting from documentation of individual routines, extending to larger and larger units, eventually encompassing all software suites, released or vaporware, the individual blob of documentation which represents for each person the sum of his or her man pages and whitepapers, the collective documentation of institutions, of open source project teams, and of companies, and of the software specially written to have documentation as one or all of its use-cases: document repositories, documentation generators, editors, code analysis libraries, wikis.

//todo: Refactor this document, it needs to be split into smaller sentences with well-defined purposes, and all these lists and mappings should be put in resource files. They’re severely affecting the readability of the code. I quit.

This book is devoted to an overview of the concepts relating to the Book and Paper, employment rational elements which constitute the Documentation.

Our time, among all the others, is characterized by these general trends: streamlining the organization and methods and procedures, machinery, cooperation, internationalization, considerable development of science and technology, concern in the data applies to the advancement of societies, extension of instruction at all levels, latent desire and willingness to give any civilization broader intellectual foundation, the guide by the plans.

It was in such an environment that nowadays evolve Books and Documents. Expressions written ideas, their instrument of fixation, conservation, their movement, they are middlemen compel all the relationships between human beings. Their huge, accumulated in the past, increases every day, every hour, new units daunting number, sometimes alarming. To them as language, we can say that they may be the worst and the best of things. To them like water fell from the sky, we can say they can cause flooding and the flood irrigation or s’épandre beneficent.

A streamlining of the Book and Paper is hence an initial unity, extending to groups of units increasingly widespread, finally embracing all units, existing or to be performed, an organization considering, Basically, the entity that individual documentary form for each person the sum of its books and papers; entity documentary collective institutions, governments and firms; entity bodies specifically devoted to the book and the paper, to all or someone of his duties: Office, Institute for Publications Editor, Library, Documentation Offices.

This book gives a general outline and present a coordinated approach.

The presentations are not lacking who said what to do single notes, the leaves of a manuscript, a pile of books, a library well-ordered; a pile of pieces of correspondence, accounting, archives in good order; a set of diverse texts, a consolidation coordinated. But these publications in large numbers, for their excellent but have envisioned that each aspect of the book, and therefore gave the impression that there were as many specific fields, distinct and separate from the watertight bulkheads, there was, in addressing each of them, to learn all new concepts, become familiar with the practices without connection with those already acquired.

This Treaty is designed primarily to generate facts, principles, rules and show how coordination and unity can be obtained.

This work is devoted to a general talk of the concepts relating to the Book and the Document, with the reasoned use of the elements which constitute Documentation. Our time, among all the others, is characterized by these general tendencies: organization and rationalization of the methods and processes, mechanization, co-operation, internationalization, considerable development of sciences and technology, concern to apply of them the data to progress of the companies, extension of the instruction to all the degrees, aspiration and latent will to give to all civilization broader intellectual bases, to direct it by plans. It is in such a medium that the Books and the Documents have nowadays to evolve/move. Written expressions of the ideas, instrument of their fixing, their conservation, their circulation, they are the intermediaries oblige of all the relationship between the Men. Their enormous mass, accumulated in the past, accroit each day, each hour, of new units in a disconcerting number, sometimes distracting. Them like Language, one can say that they can be the worst and best things. Them like water fallen from the sky, one can say that they can cause the flood and the flood or épandre in beneficial irrigation. A rationalization of the Book and Document are essential, on the basis of an initial unit, extending to groups from units increasingly extended, embracing finally all the units, existing or to realize, in an organization considering, at the base, the individual documentary entity which form for each person the sum of her books and its papers; collective documentary entity of the institutions, the administrations and the firms; entity of the bodies especially devoted to the Book and the Document, the whole or some one of its functions: Office, Institute, Drafting of the Publications, Libraries, Offices of Documentation. This work gives of it a general draft and into present a coordinated method. The talks do not miss which said how to make, of simple notes, the sheets of a manuscript; of a cluster of books, a well ordered library; of a cluster of parts of correspondence, of accountancy, files in good order; of a whole various of texts, a coordinated coding. But these publications in great number, excellent as for their goal, did not consider each one that an aspect of the things of the book, and consequently gave the impression that there was like as many specific fields, distinct and separated by watertight bulkheads, that there was, by approaching each one of them, to initiate itself with very new concepts, to familiarize itself with practices without connection with those already acquired. This Treaty aims before very releasing from the facts, the principles, the general rules and showing how coordination and the unit can be obtained.